Community through Nomenclature
The proper object of history is not the past but the past-present-future relationship. Thus, it is under the auspices of furusato-zukuri that the land reclamation program engineered by the Tokugawa bakufu has become an absorbing subject of study in Kodaira. As I noted in the Introduction, this chapter has two related agendas. One is to analyze various remakings of "Kodaira's" past; the other is to construct from archival data a coherent literary portrait of the social, political, and economic circumstances of the Edo-period farm villages that were later amalgamated under the name Kodaira. Knowledge of the circumstances of both the shinden villages and the amalgamation of those villages as "Kodaira" contributes to the anthropology of Japan, but this knowledge also has been used by natives and by Kodaira City Hall.[1] The natives have used it for the purpose of revanchism, and city hall has used it to promote a "living history" within Kodaira.
The name Kodaira
Map 3.
The "Kodaira Seven" shinden. OM = Ogawa-mura; OS = Ogawa-shinden; ON
= Onumata-shinden; NS-Y = Nonaka-shinden (Yoemon-gumi); NS-Z =
Nonaka-shinden (Zenzaemon-gumi); SS = Suzuki-shinden; MT = Megurita-
shinden. (Adapted from KK 1983, 80)
located within the boundaries of present-day Kodaira and were developed as independent villages. Delegates from each of these seven villages met to decide on an appropriate name for the new administrative village. They first considered the obvious name Shichiri, literally "seven villages," but eventually settled on Kodaira. Ko (the alternative Japanese-style reading for o ) means "small" and was derived from the "o" in Ogawa(-mura ). Taira, or "plain," was chosen in view of the Musashino area's flat topography (KC 1959, 403).
The very act of choosing and assigning place-names is a cogent means of generating "imagined communities" and particular solidarities. The term imagined communities was proposed in an "anthropological spirit" by Anderson (1983) to define nation-ness, nationality, and nationalism, which he further referred to as "cultural artefacts of a particular kind,"—lexicological, for example (ibid., 13–14, 101-2). To understand these and other such artifacts adequately, "we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy" (ibid., 13–14).
"Imagined communities" characterizes both shinden village—making in the Edo period and the episodic making of Kodaira City, from the naming of the new administrative village in 1889 to Furusato Kodaira today. The name Kodaira has a peculiar kind of self-referentiality, because it enters into the very constitution of the community (cf. Searle
1984, 16). That is, a place-name is suggested by certain features and historical conditions just as it reconstitutes them under a systematizing rubric. What are the implications of the toponym Kodaira?
Ko was the prefix chosen in deference to the historical primacy of Ogawa-mura, which remains the city's most socially and geographically intact district. The integrity of this district also inheres in the fact that, of the seven amalgamated villages, its name alone was incorporated into the place-name Kodaira. By the same token, the administrative village of Kodaira acquired, through nomenclatural fiat, a historicity—Ogawa-mura' s—that belied its newness and artifice. It is no wonder that Ogawa Kurobei (d. 1669), who first set about reclaiming the village he then named after himself, has since been proclaimed the civic ancestor of all Kodaira residents. As noted above, the suffix taira was selected in view of the area's flat topography, and much symbolic value subsequently was invested in this flatness. The area's undistinguished landscape corresponds to its desolation prior to Kurobei's reclamation project. There is a confluence of signification between ko and taira insofar as they both allude in a specific sense to the historical personage of Ogawa Kurobei and in a general sense to the shinden pioneers as a hardy breed of settler in a virtual wasteland.[2]
The implications of the name Kodaira are also evident in the preamble to the Kodaira citizens' charter, promulgated in 1972. Three years later, in 1975, the wording of this preamble was contested by one of the six, at the time, Clean Government Party (CGP) assemblypersons. The assemblyperson pointed out that, although it provided the "spiritual structure" for citizen participation, the preamble nevertheless was inaccurate and misleading. He charged that the area was neither uninhabitable nor uninhabited prior to Kurobei, inasmuch as paleolithic settlements were present up to 20,000 years before any shinden villages were reclaimed in the Edo period. Mayor Oshima countered with the argument that the "modern historical development" of the area began with the reclamation of Ogawa-mura, which today is a source of spiritual inspiration for cooperative citizen participation. Therefore, "the wording of the preamble is suitable as is" (Oshima in KGR, September 1975, 166, 168).
Oshima's concern for historical accuracy was superseded by contemporary needs, the acknowledgment of paleolithic settlements not being among them. However, even efforts to publicize and popularize prereclamation history have served effectively to augment the imagination of a unique Kodaira. For example, in his various public lectures, Kato
Y., a Kodaira native and professor of archaeology at Kokugakuin University, draws attention to the uniqueness of "the city's" paleohistory. He emphasizes that nowhere in the world but Kodaira have so many "barbecued rocks" been found, his playful reference to the heated ferrous stones that the ancients had used for cooking purposes. Also, in one of the lectures making up the nine-week "furusato seminar" I attended, Kato referred to the paleohistorical inhabitants of the area as "'Kodaira Man,' a species of Cro-Magnon just like the one in Europe." This is not the occasion to challenge Kato's terminology; rather, his neologism illustrates the manner in which the area's ancient and more recent pasts alike have been assimilated under the rubric "Kodaira."
"Slogans and epithets are the materials out of which territorial sensitizing concepts are made" (Erickson 1980, 33). The place-name Kodaira, with its geohistorical reverberations, itself prompts these sloganized tributes to the shinden pioneers and the rigors of villagemaking. The citizens' charter (1977) of the neighboring city of Higashiyamato contains no reference to its sociohistorical legacy, apart from a reminder that it behooves citizens to learn about local history. Whereas both Kodaira charters refer to the city's historical "cultural landscape," the Higashiyamato charter dwells only on the physical environment: "Higashiyamato City is fortunate in being blessed with the natural beauty of Tama Lake and the forested hills of Sayama."[3]
A comparison of citizens' charters suggests that—among the twenty-six cities, five towns, and one village making up the Santama district—Kodaira is unique in drawing parallels and posing metaphorical links between the shinden village—making of the past and the furusato-zukuri of today.[4] The salient features of this shinden -based mythopoeia include pioneers and the intrepid pioneer spirit, the notion of social salvation through wasteland reclamation, local autonomy, and a hybrid philosophy of self-help and mutual aid.
Further explorations of the connections between yesterday's shinden village and today's Furusato Kodaira show that the analogies are reciprocal, for it is under the auspices of native place-making that village-making has become an absorbing subject of local historical study. The findings of these studies, moreover, have been appropriated in recent efforts to reclaim the "authentic" community presumed to have characterized the Edo-period shinden villages. Not only is the present-day city represented as a "natural" transformation of those villages, but the emphasis on authenticity has more to do with present-day needs than past realities.
The formation of Kodaira-mura itself has remained uncelebrated from the start. I offer the following explanation why. Through nomenclature, essentially two coexistent entities—two Kodairas—were created, one an amalgamation of seven villages, the other a symbiosis of Kodaira and Ogawa-mura. The name Kodaira effectively assimilated the historicity of Ogawa-mura: to commemorate Ogawa-mura's reclamation is to be mindful of Kodaira's beginnings, and vice versa. Thus, one constantly encounters in city publications such anachronistic statements as "Kodaira's origins in 1656" and "Kodaira's pioneering ancestor, Kurobei" (KGR 1982, 16–17). By the same token, Kyoda Kodaira, an abridged local history used as a city school text, devotes a quarter of the 120-page chapter on local history to Ogawa-mura (Kyodo Kodaira henshu iinkai [1967] 1983). Kurobei's biography and the genealogy of the Ogawa household alone span eight pages. Moreover, Ogawa-mura features prominently in the sections dealing with shinden -village life and work. Neither the founders nor the beginnings of the other shinden villages similarly are observed as civic causes célèbres.
The lopsided relationship between Kodaira and its constituent shinden villages highlights and reinforces a palpable microlocal patriotism on the part of Ogawa-mura natives. To be sure, Kodaira natives as a whole comprise an integral, self-conscious society vis-à-vis the fractionated newcomer sector, but within the natives' society Ogawa indigenes perceive of themselves, and are perceived by others, as Kodaira's "really real" natives. The implications of this civic favoritism, as it were, ramify in a number of domains, from the geohistorical to the religious and politicoeconomic. Since religious creeds and consociations are the subject of chapter 4, and forms of neighborhood organization and association are discussed in chapter 5, my focus in this chapter is on the sociohistorical making and remaking of Kodaira, beginning with the reclamation in 1656 of Ogawa-mura.